I've been doing a lot of research on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, penned in 1948 and signed by the member states of the United Nations.
Yesterday I took a tour of the United Nations (it's 18 acres that belong to the whole world) and the guide said there were 192 member nations. I asked if any nations didn't belong. She said, Cook Islands, the Holy See (although they have observor status), and some island called Nauru or Niwi or something. The woman had a very strong Japanese accent and there were some words I couldn't understand.
I looked up the Cook Islands which are protected by New Zealand and only have 14,000 people. Their main language is English. They are only about 200 square miles.
In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights there are some rights that appear to conflict with one another. For instance, everyone has the right to express themselves and to an education. However, there is also the right of each culture to retain their ways. So, some cultures (the Taliban, for example) do not want their women to be able to read and write. Do they have the right to their culture, or must they allow women the universal right to read and speak and educate themselves? I think we mostly feel that they ought to allow the women to read. This smashes their culture.
Many religious groups are not in accord with the United Nations and their demands for absolute equality. Catholics and some Lutheran groups do not allow women to be priests for instance. Do we have the right to our cultural beliefs? If we do, why don't the Taliban?
This conflict within rights discourse fascinates me.
The United Nations was started by the winners of the Second World War: France, England, China, America and Russia were the initiators of the institution, the Japanese tour guide said. Germany and Japan, losers in WWII, do not have security coucil status and cannot veto motions, as can the big five. I wondered what she thought about this, but I was too afraid to ask.
The United Nations had a dual role at its inception. They wanted to stop future wars by making the whole world a matter of countries under self-rule. They therefore wished to get rid of European colonies. However, the central nations are European, and so some argue that the United Nations is colonialism by other means. The notion of tolerance -- beyond which we must go to war, is another UN idea. They want us to be able to tolerate each other.
The UN Peacekeeping army (an all-volunteer army) won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1998. The UN are not disposed to invade a country (but isn't that what happened in Afghanistan?) but they are supposed to use sanctions. However, it's possible to invade (especially to prevent genocide).
There were lots of contradictions. An army won the Peacekeeping prize. People have the right to their own culture, except when it conflicts with western cultural notions of education and freedom of speech. The globalization of human rights through the United Nations can be seen as a westernization of the whole world. At the same time, it has a countervalent movement to rid the third world of western colonies.
In 1945, when the United Nations was started, there were hundreds of colonies around the world. Now there are only about thirteen. One of them was the Falkland Islands off of Argentina. Is that really a colony? The people there are largely British, and haven't voted to secede, to my knowledge.
There was an exhibit about Palestine, but we weren't allowed to stop there and read it. We had to keep moving.
Meanwhile, the guide told us that the referendum in the Southern Sudan went through. So it looks like we'll have 193 nations at the United Nations soon. I wonder what their flag will look like and what they will call their country.
Some 100% good things the UN is doing: they have given insecticide treated nets to 60 million children in Africa and malaria has fallen 80%. They are working to get rid of landmines worldwide. 80% of the victims of landmines are illiterate children. They are trying to cut hungry people in half. They give school supplies to kids. They are working to provide fresh water in Haiti. In India, they are trying to get more toilets to people. 600,000,000 people in India have never sat on a functioning toilet.
The United Nations is trying to spread equality around the globe. This means that they want women to own more property, for instance. Only 1% of the world's wealth is held by women. But in America, more women than men go to college. Should the United Nations correct that second imbalance?
Everyone is constantly striving to get ahead (of others) and meanwhile, there are organizations that are devoted to absolute equality. I find these countervalent impulses comical... and yet necessary!
11 comments:
Taiwan is not represented at the UN because the Chinese consider it to be their province.
Craig wrote this in another thread:
The Cook Islands and Niue aren't full members of the UN but they are members and do benefit from UN programs. Their Westminster parliamentary style government is in what is described as "free association" with New Zealand, a status similar to the "compact" that the Federated States of Micronesia has with the United States. They are in effect in the process of becoming independent countries.
The Cook Islands has fifteen inhabited islands and only about 20,000 people, half of whom live on one island. Many of the outer islands are coral atolls with less than five hundred inhabitants. Niue was originally part of the Cook Islands, but opted out, in much the same way that Palau opted out when given the opportunity to be the fifth Federated State of Micronesia. Niue is much closer to Tonga and Samoa, both culturally and geographically. Cook Islanders play host to about 100,000 tourists every year.
Cook Island rugby teams have been known to handily defeat teams representing countries like the United States, Canada and Japan in international competitions. The main island has nine villages. Each village has its own rugby team. The village of Tupapa usually wins the national title, giving them the right to challenge national teams from all over the world. I was there in 1990 when Scotland got thumped by Tupapa. The Cook Islanders may have recalled a few of their players from New Zealand for the occasion.
Most Cook Islanders between the ages of twenty and fifty live and work abroad, usually in New Zealand or Australia, so the village of Tupapa consists primarily of two or three hundred school children and their retired grandparents. Their best rugby players are either attending university in New Zealand on rugby scholarships or competing for a spot on the roster of New Zealand's All Blacks. Their girls have won world titles in netball. The country has sent lawn bowlers to compete at the Olympic Games.
The school day begins with a short assembly, girls on one side of the assembly hall's central aisle, boys on the other, followed by about forty minutes of acapella polyharmonic singing. New Zealand Maoris consider the Cook Islands their ancestral homeland.
I read Typee while I was there. It's set in the Society Islands of French Polynesia on the island of Nuku Hiva, the same type of high island as Rarotonga in the English speaking Cooks. Nobody has come anywhere close to improving on Melville's description. The first Christian missionaries came to Rarotonga from Pape'ete in Tahiti, which is substantially larger than the Cooks, but officially a French territory, so not eligible for UN membership.
I think it would be interesting if the NFL would replace the Pro Bowl with a game pitting players with Tongan or Samoan birth or ancestry against the players selected by merit for the Pro Bowl. They could call it the Jim Thorpe Bowl.
They can have rights, but only if they're the right rights.
Likewise they can have culture, but only if it's cultured culture.
They are trying to cut hungry people in half.
A Solomonic solution. Or is it Swiftian?
Craig too.
Merry and I visited the Cook Islands a decade ago, and had a blast. We flew to Rarotonga, the main island.
Pacific Islands are either coral atolls, or volcanic peaks. Rarotonga is a volcanic peak, which means the island is literally just a mountain , surrounded by a reef. The only main road circles the island. Kind of monotonous--round and round.
We swam in the "Princess's pool--luscious pale bluish-green seawater about 3 1/2 feet deep, with a gently fluctuation roll (current) protected partially by a huge rock. I felt like an islander as I floated absently in it. Perhaps there was a reef shark patrolling just beyond my reach, but I saw nothing swimming in the water around me.
We drove a small motorcycle around--the first time I'd ever ridden one. Dangerous on hill slopes!
Great exotic cocktails. But the heat!--my hair stuck to my scalp, and anything more than shorts and t-shirt meant you were drenched in your own sweat. Violent, brief storms would dump a ton of water on everything, then 10 minutes later everything was bone dry again. Nobody seems to care if anything gets done or accomplished--the pace is really laid back. Great place to read a Tolstoy novel, in the shade of a bow-wow tree or whatever.
They speak inflected English like the New Zealanders. Take themselves very seriously, but in a casual way. Don't think I'll ever go back again.
The United Nations seems now like a transitional organization. The League of Nations failed because people really couldn't put their trust in the hands of a higher power. The UN will probably fail for the same reason. Islam might be the cause of its eventual death--Muslims just won't modernize.
George Grady beat me to the punch! Yes, cutting hungry people in half would definitely reduce the numbers of hungry people :P
The UN seems to have contradictory goals. They are supposed to respect local culture and yet to announce and emphasize women's rights, and children's rights, and economic parity, that in some cases at any fly in the face of local culture.
Every country has one vote, but we are paying for about a third of the upkeep of the UN.
Tiny countries like Laos have a vote that in some ways is equal to others, but on the other hand, the US is on the permanent Security Council, which gives us a bigger voice than many others.
It was great to hear about the Cook Islands from Curtis and Craig.
I'm quite sure I'll never get there.
There are 192-195 countries.
I think I've been to about twenty:
USA, Canada, Mexico, England, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Poland, Belgium, Germany, Holland, France, Spain, Portugal, Hong Kong, Macau, China, Japan.
That's it.
I wonder which of us have been to the most countries.
I think I've been in every state in the continental US, but never been to Alaska or Hawaii, and for some don't care to do so. I enjoy traveling, but am fairly happy to just do nothing, too.
One of my wife's colleagues, an Indian from Delhi, hosted a farewell dinner a few nights ago for another colleague, whose assignment just ended, a Kosovar, and for some odd reason I was seated next to the guest of honor.
I asked her how old she was when Tito died. She said she was six and everybody cried that day. She'd been Yugoslavian up until a dozen years ago when the UN took steps to end the genocide. She told me ninety percent of Kosovars are ethnically Albanian, coinciding with the percentage of the population who are Muslim, though officially the country is secular. It's contiguous with Albania, but during WWII Kosovo was the part of Yugoslavia occupied by Hitler and Mussolini. Its per capita income is the lowest in all of Europe, though it has the continent's second largest reserve of coal.
Her husband has been teaching political science at Georgia State in Atlanta, but he's just taken a job at the University of Leipzig. I have an invitation to visit the next time I'm in Germany.
I've heard it said that Walt Disney has more employees and a bigger budget than the UN.
I was watching a religious channel last night and the commenter volunteered that the UN is a vastly flawed institution culled together by Alger Hiss, a communist turncoat, and that it ought to be kicked out to sea.
I may have met that commenter. Was he employed by the UN during the Bush administration?
Post a Comment